The European Commission has gathered nine of its textile recycling projects into a single review, and the same conclusion runs through all of them. The science of turning old clothes back into fibre is largely solved. What Europe still cannot do, at anything like the scale recycling needs, is collect and sort the clothing in the first place.

Published last month, the second edition of the CORDIS Results Pack on the future of textiles profiles projects funded under Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe, several coordinated by or involving brands including adidas and H&M. The story it tells is one the sector already knows. Every year the average European buys around 26 kilograms of clothing and household textiles and discards 11, most of it simply thrown away. Of the 6.94 million tonnes of textile waste the EU generated in 2022, 85 per cent ended up in mixed household waste, from which it could be neither reused nor recycled. The same garments feed an industry that emits more carbon than the world's aviation and shipping combined, yet barely one per cent of the fibre ever comes back as fibre.

The chemistry has moved on

What the projects collectively show is how far the recycling end of the chain has come. The New Cotton project, coordinated by Finland's Infinited Fiber Company, used a cellulose carbamate process to turn sorted textile waste into a regenerated fibre, Infinna, that was spun into yarn and made into garments sold by adidas and H&M. The process avoids the carbon disulphide used in conventional viscose production. "By using various feedstocks, this technology significantly reduces the need for virgin raw materials, offering substantial environmental benefits," said Elias Veijola, the project's coordinator and a process development engineer at Infinited Fiber.

T-REX, coordinated by adidas, demonstrated that mixed-composition garments, not only single-fibre 'mono-material' items, can be chemically recycled into new products, and published a blueprint for scaling textile-to-textile recycling across Europe. CISUTAC, led by the Belgian textile research centre Centexbel, lifted the recyclability of sorted garments to 90 per cent and recovered high-value aramid fibres from end-of-life firefighter suits. Both depended on the same upstream step working properly, which is a supply of clean, well-sorted feedstock.

A second strand of the portfolio works at the other end of the product life, designing waste out from the start. HEREWEAR produced corporate and streetwear from man-made cellulosic fibre derived from seaweed, straw and manure, and from polylactic acid as a bio-based substitute for polyester. MY-FI grew nonwoven textiles from mycelium, the root structure of fungi, for fashion and automotive use. Glaukos developed polymers for clothing and fishing gear engineered to break down in seawater, aimed at the microplastic shed by synthetic fabrics. These sit at an earlier stage than the recycling work, and the review presents them as ways to reduce the volume and toxicity of what eventually needs sorting rather than as near-term replacements.

The wall is sorting

That is where the portfolio's optimism narrows. "Textile preprocessing emerged as an underestimated challenge," said Natalia Mena, technical coordinator of T-REX at adidas. Available technologies are not yet developed for textile-specific applications, the project found, and in some cases neither sorters nor recyclers were carrying out preprocessing at all, leaving the work to third parties. The collection systems needed to supply recyclers with targeted batches of material at the right quality did not exist at scale in Europe, Mena reported, and the consortium had to organise them through partners.

Several of the projects went at the problem directly. tExtended, coordinated by Finland's VTT research centre, developed hyperspectral imaging able to identify fibre composition during sorting, paired with a 'textile waste router' that directs each material stream towards reuse, remanufacturing or the appropriate recycling method. The SCIRT project's partner Valvan built automated systems to sort and trim discarded fabric at speed, using cameras, near-infrared scanning and metal detection to strip out zips, buttons and tags. SCIRT reported that the work lifted the recyclability of garments to 90 per cent.

None of it resolves the economics. CISUTAC noted that several textile collection and sorting companies went bankrupt over the course of the project, which the consortium took as evidence that technical progress alone is not enough without viable business conditions. Acceptance of reuse and repair, the review found, has moved faster than the commercial infrastructure needed to support either.

There is a quality gap as well, sitting between recyclers and the brands they sell to. "One of the main challenges we started with was the quality of recycled yarns not aligning with the requirements from fashion brands," said Evelien Dils, coordinator of SCIRT at the Flemish research institute VITO. To shift the consumer end, SCIRT built a 'True Cost Calculator' putting a figure on a garment's real social and environmental cost, and trialled a take-back scheme with Belgian retailer Bel&Bo that offered discounts to customers returning unwanted clothing.

The traceability deadline

Much of the work anticipates the EU's incoming traceability regime. From 2030, a digital product passport will be mandatory for textiles under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation, carrying data on a garment's origin, composition, repairability and end-of-life options. Projects including TRICK and tExtended built systems to capture that data at production and make it available to sorters and recyclers further down the line, using QR codes and RFID tags. TRICK reported that 66 per cent of consumers say they would pay more for sustainably produced clothing, against an average garment worn only three times before being discarded.

For the UK, the contrast is in the timetable. Separate collection of textile waste has been mandatory across EU member states since January 2025, and the digital product passport deadline gives brands and recyclers a fixed date to design towards. The UK has no equivalent legal driver. A blueprint published in January by WRAP, the Waste and Resources Action Programme, on behalf of the UK Textiles Pact set out how a mandatory textiles Extended Producer Responsibility (tEPR) scheme could be designed, warning that the used textiles sector faces collapse without one. It waits on the government's Circular Economy Growth Plan, which seems now trapped in the quagmire of Government anxiety that a plan will need funding.

Currently, almost half of all used textiles in the UK are thrown into household bins, equivalent to 35 items per person a year, while local authority costs for handling textile waste are projected to rise from £73 million now to £200 million by 2035. However, given that tEPR provides a route to meeting this cost without direct taxation, there is less of an obstacle to enabling the idea to flourish.

Looking across Europe, the lesson of the nine projects is that it is not about any single technology. T-REX's closing guidance to designers puts it plainly, that recycling is not a standalone solution and designing garments for durability and reuse has to come first. The recycling chain Europe has spent a decade building works. Whether enough clothing reaches it in a usable state is the part still unsolved.